LC1 chaise longue

Born in Sydney in 1963, Marc Newson is Australia's most succesful designer and one of the most renowned international designers working today. Known for his iconic, 'Lockheed Lounge' design, which sold for US$4.69 million in 2015, a record for furntiure by a living designer, Newson has developed a highly successful international career over four decades, working across a range of disciplines designing for major international fashion, homeweare, automotive, aviation brands and firms. He has designed everything from luxury handbags, aeroplane suites, cars, weapons, watches, shoes, lighting and even a toilet.

Newson studied jewellery design and sculpture through his Fine Arts degree at The University of Sydney graduating in 1984. In 1986, Newson received a grant from the Australian Crafts Council to produce new work for his first solo exhibition, Seating for Six, Roslyn Oxley Gallery in 1986, which featured the LC1, now in the Gallery's collection. Shortly after he established his Sydney workshop, hand making furniture and time pieces and during this time produced his Super Guppy lamp, 1987 and Embryo chair, 1988. In 1991 he moved to Paris, and later to London in 1997, where he established Marc Newon Ltd. Newson had held senior creative roles with Qantas Airways (2005-2015) and Apple (2014-). He holds a Honorary Doctorate from the Royal College of Art, London and The University of Sydney. His work is held in major collection around the world including the Victoria and Albert Museum, London, Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum, New York, Museum für Kunst und Gewerbe, Hamburg and Musée des Arts Décoratifs, Paris among many other major museums.

Marc Newson is the most successful Australian designer of the late twentieth and twenty-first centuries. Graduating from the Sydney College of the Arts in 1984, he created this work, LC1 chaise longue in 1986 for gallerist Roslyn Oxley’s Seating for Six exhibition at the young age of twenty-three. The title of the work is a reference to the LC4 chair, developed in 1928 by the French designers, Le Corbusier, Charlotte Perriand and Pierre Jeanneret. The work was subsequently purchased by the Gallery by the then Curator of Australian Art, Ron Radford, for $3000.  

An early prototype for his 1988 Lockheed lounge, now considered an international design icon, LC1 chaise longue is constructed of a fibreglass body, which is covered with riveted, hand-beaten aluminium – as is Lockheed lounge. The form for the 1988 version references the lounge depicted in Jacques-Louis David’s 1800 portrait of French socialite Juliette Récamier. The Gallery’s work differs from his later Lockheed lounge with its deliberate neoclassical scrolled head, Newson later refining this detail into a rounded, bulbous shape. 

Rebecca Evans, Curator of Decorative Arts & Design